For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements identified radical social transformation with the capture of state power. The collapse of these statist projects from the 1970s led to a global crisis of left and working class politics. But this crisis has also opened space for the rediscovery of society-centred, anti-capitalist modes of bottom-up change, operating at a distance from the state. These modes have registered important successes in practice, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and in Rojava in Syria, and have been a key influence on movements ranging from Occupy in United States, to landless movements in Latin America, to anti-austerity struggles in Europe and Asia, to urban movements in Africa. Its lineages include anarchism and syndicalism, autonomist Marxism, philosophers like Alain Badiou and radical popular praxis. This book, a collection of papers from a 2012 conference of academics and social movements in South Africa, helps recover an understanding of social transformation from below that has been analytically and politically side-lined globally but that, like a seed in the soil, keeps breaking through and growing. Besides mapping and creating a dialogue between major positions within the broad category of "at a distance" politics, this path-breaking volume provides case studies of this kind of politics with reference to South Africa and Zimbabwe. The chapters originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.